The Theatre of the Bauhaus

It is time for a complete reappraisal of the stage in the Bauhaus. Moreover, to adapt Oskar Schlemmer’s own words, the theatre of the Bauhaus may lead us to the keyhole to the riddle which the Bauhaus poses. ¹ The Bauhaus-trained architect Hubert Hoffmann described the Bauhaus as the ‘workshop of the future’. He made the claim that just as the ideas of the Renaissance lasted longer than 300 years, so the ideas of the Bauhaus would shape our future for another 300 years and more (Bogner 1997: 15). As notions of ‘Modernism’ in architecture hijacked the complex ideals of the Bauhaus, a cultural, ethical and social vision of the future was reduced to a simplified functionalism known eventually as the International Style. ² As our age challenges our ability to ground ourselves in the fast changing and perishing world around us, confused by rapid advances in technology that have opened up a new dimension of virtual space and digital realities in less than thirty years, it is time, in the words of Pelle Ehn, once again to ‘unite the two sides of Enlightenment: the hard (technology and natural sciences) and the soft (values, democracy, art and ethics)’ (Ehn 1998). The stage, a laboratory for the imagination, occupied a central a place within the Bauhaus, and its presence has been too long unaccounted for and forgotten, not only by theatre historians but by architects and designers. The stage and its work undermine many myths about the Bauhaus’s ‘International Style’ and its functionalist levelling. It is a necessary and vital antidote, since ‘Bauhaus’ ideas on architecture and the built environment have been so firmly rejected over the past thirty years or more. This book provides the first full-length history of the Bauhaus stage under its ‘Master Magician’ ³ Oskar Schlemmer, and in doing so grounds its ethos and that of the Bauhaus as a whole in values that give the lie to clichés about Bauhaus rigidity, purism, lack of imagination and pervasive ‘Fordism’ (one size and colour fits all) in its architectural ideals.